sábado, 31 de agosto de 2013

Lessons in Unification: Germany's History and the EU's Future

From STRATFOR - Global Intelligence

By Marc Lanthemann

Europe's
leaders will soon return from summer vacation, and when they do, they
will be forced to confront problems that persisted in their absence --
namely, high unemployment and a looming consumer credit crisis. Some
have expressed optimism over recent improvements in the European crisis,
but German leaders may be less assured. More than anyone else, they
understand that the debate over whether the European Union should
integrate further is unavoidable; further integration may be one of the
only ways the bloc can outlive its current problems.

They
understand this because Germany's own unification was such an arduous
process. It took decades of war, major technological shifts and
extraordinary leadership for the various German mini-states to unify.
Ultimately, they came together for one reason: survival. Now Germany
must once again measure the risks and rewards associated with
integration, only this time for the sake of preserving the whole of
Europe. But there is a limit to how much Berlin is willing to sacrifice
for a group of nations that innately distrusts German power.

Partial Execution

As
a model of governance, the European Union failed simply because it was
never executed fully. In 1992, a few countries within the European
Union's free trade zone agreed to abandon their own currencies for a
common currency, thereby relinquishing their monetary policy to a
centralized bureaucracy, the European Central Bank. They did not agree
on what their next steps should be toward further fiscal, and thus
political, integration. The eurozone has since expanded to include 17
countries, but it did little to change the fact that the value of money
was created in one place but spent in another.

This
arrangement proved to be an extraordinary generator of wealth in times
of global prosperity, so long as financial markets regarded Greece's
economic risk to be on par with Germany's. But it left the eurozone
uniquely unequipped to deal with large-scale economic crises. Without
monetary control, individual countries could not devalue their
currencies -- a common practice for escaping recessions. Meanwhile, EU
institutions were unable to implement and enforce a coherent strategy
because they lacked the fiscal and political control over their
constituent members. By dividing power between the countries and a
centralized bureaucracy, each part is left unable to move effectively,
and the entire system becomes paralyzed.

In
its current form, the European Union is inherently unstable and
unsustainable. However, many Europeans still believe the Continent can
and should be unified; for them, unification is a path out of the
current crisis. And they are right to think so. In theory, a federalized
Europe would be more stable and more prosperous than the current
hybridized system.

These
are only the most recent Europeans to dream of a unified Continent.
Many before them have attempted to bring so many countries under the
aegis of one polity, but none were able to bridge the interests of so
many powerful nations. The problem is that their attempts began with
bloodshed and ended in chaos.

Though
it is not a perfect analogy for the formation of the European Union,
Germany in the 19th century is perhaps the best example in modern
history of a successful unification. Unlike Europe, Germany was the
product of polities with common ethno-linguistic roots. Nonetheless, its
composite parts were an assortment of competing mini-states whose
sacrifices helped build a prosperous nation. German history could inform
Europe's understanding of the true costs of unification. For its part,
Berlin should bear in mind the lessons of unification as it is forging a
true European Union, should it choose to do so.

Shared Legacies

More
often than not, new political systems are rooted in the ashes of war.
The European Union and Germany share this tradition. Theirs is a legacy
of birth marked by conflict so severe that it destroyed the old system and gave way to unorthodox solutions previously unthinkable.

The
European Union came from the trauma of World War I and World War II.
This 30-year period brought what was then the most powerful group of
nations in the history of the world to its knees, leaving behind a
ruined, exhausted and divided Continent.

The
Napoleonic Wars brought about modern Germany. By the end of the 18th
century, Germany's predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire, was composed of
nearly 200 quasi-independent states in an area that covered what is now
Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and many others in Central and
Northern Europe. This disunited band of bickering principalities,
duchies and electorates was utterly incapable of standing up to the
citizen armies unleashed after the French Revolution. The revolutionary
armies eventually consolidated under the control of the general-emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte, easily defeated the haphazard coalition of German
forces and their allies and steamrolled through Europe before reaching
Russia.

It
took 22 years and six successive coalitions by all the major European
powers to finally defeat the French armies. The Holy Roman Empire had
been completely dissolved and the Napoleonic Empire, through its chief
diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, had encouraged a
process whereby small German states would be incorporated into their
larger neighbors to ease political transitions. By the early 19th
century, only about 40 German entities remained.

The French Revolution
was as instrumental for creating Germany as the two world wars were for
creating modern Europe. The French Revolution created new ways of
thinking about what it meant to be a nation-state. Years of bloodshed
left behind a group of exhausted nations conscious of their own weakness
as the world around them changed. However, a different kind of
revolution was necessary to spur the creation of a united Europe. The
prospect of economic gain would have to entice individual nations to
integrate more closely. For Germany, that event was the Industrial
Revolution; for Europe, it was the global economic boom of the 1980s and
1990s.

Throughout
the 19th century, technological advances in manufacturing processes
made manufacturers radically more productive. New transportation
technologies, particularly the steam engine, enabled nations to become
internally connected through rail and to reach more consumer markets.
The Industrial Revolution began in England and eventually spread to the
Continent.

But
Germany remained politically fragmented, unable to join this revolution
or embrace an industrialized economic model. Prior the Industrial
Revolution, political fragmentation was only modestly restrictive; most
of the Continent relied on agriculture, not industry. But the
development of high-productivity manufacturing required large amounts of
unevenly distributed mineral resources and free access to large amounts
of consumers, conditions that put the various fragmented German
mini-states at a serious disadvantage. Products manufactured in Prussia
had to be inspected and taxed as many as a dozen times before reaching
Wallonia, where coal and steel had to undergo the same ordeal in the
opposite direction. This created huge additional costs for German
industries and stunted the development of the German states. The
resultant economic imbalance was one of the many catalysts for the
German revolutions of 1848.

In
the late 20th century, modern Europe believed it had to remove tariffs
and the restrictions on capital movement if it were to keep up with the
growing economic and political might of the United States and Japan.
These two economic powers dwarfed even the greatest individual European
nations, but as a whole, Europe remained the wealthiest part of the
world. For Europe, like Germany in the 19th century, a free economic
zone was the logical next step.

At
the behest of Prussia, a small number of German states formalized a
customs union in 1834 that eventually reduced or otherwise abolished
tariffs, created a single labor market and integrated capital markets.
Starting in the 1840s, Germany's first rail links were laid across the
members of the customs union, establishing an increasingly prosperous
domestic market and bolstering Prussia's pre-eminence among German
states. The union continued to expand over the years but always stopped
short of becoming a monetary and banking union.

Prussia
saw little interest in diluting the strength of its banking sector
before guaranteeing its control over the fiscal and economic policies of
the other members of the customs union. It is at this point that the
unification of Germany and the unification of the European Union begin
to diverge.

Unlike
19th century Germany, modern Europe pushed the boundaries of the trade
union and has created a European Central Bank that administers the
monetary policy of a steadily increasing number of member states. While
nations were willing to relinquish control of their currency, tempted as
they were by the promise of accumulating even greater wealth, they are
not as willing to surrender sovereignty over their fiscal policy. Many
see no reason to give Brussels control over their military or energy
budgets, for example.

Moreover,
the European Union also lacks an internal leader that is willing and
able to act decisively. From the very beginning, Prussia shaped the
unification of the German nation. It had gained some 500,000 subjects
and 10,000 square kilometers (nearly 4,000 square miles) of land after
the Napoleonic Wars and had the best land army in Europe. Like Prussia,
modern Germany is the wealthiest and most powerful member of its
respective trading bloc, yet it has continuously balked at assuming
leadership of the European Union. In a telling anecdote, when financial
markets were reeling from uncertainty over a string of bailouts,
Poland's foreign minister famously said in 2012 that for the first time
in history his country feared German inaction more than German action.

No 'Blood' or 'Iron'

Germany's
reluctance to be Europe's leader is perfectly rational for Berlin. In
fact, its reluctance highlights another key difference between
Chancellor Angela Merkel's situation and that of her most illustrious
predecessor, Otto von Bismarck. The original design of a united post-war
Europe was foreign-made. A trade union in Europe served the strategic
interest of the United States. While modern Germany has greatly
benefited from the European Union (more than anyone, in fact) as a trade
union, it is far from certain that a full fiscal and political union is
in Berlin's interest. It is not even clear that it would solve the
great problem in modern Europe: the current economic and social crisis.

The
wealth of Prussia's customs union was not a means in itself for
Prussia, although it greatly contributed to its strength. Prussia's
national security was at stake. The Napoleonic Wars and the slow but
steady expansion of the Austrian and Russian empires made it very clear
to Prussia that only a political, economic and military union of
German-speaking people would guarantee its security.

Such
calculations are nearly absent from German strategic thinking today.
There are no security threats to the core of the European Union that
could spur Germany into action. Even Russia has understood the lessons
of the Soviet Union and, for now, appears content to focus on
maintaining its own domestic stability while making only modest forays
in Central Europe. Thus there is nothing driving Germany to push for
further integration with the European Union.

The
question then is whether Germany's imperative to preserve the trade
union, on which much of its economic prosperity depends, will merit a
stronger push from Berlin. The case study of Germany offers yet another
cautionary tale regarding the true costs of the next step to
unification.

In
1862, after being appointed Prussia's minister-president and foreign
minister, Bismarck appeared in front of the parliament and delivered a
historic speech asking lawmakers to approve a massive increase in
Prussian military spending. Bismarck noted that the great problem of
German unification would be solved only by "blood and iron." Bismarck
clearly understood that the alignment of economic interests that had
created the customs union had reached its limit and that the next phase
in the creation of a wealthy and secure European state would have to
involve coercion.

Bismarck
turned out to be right, and modern Germany was born on two
battlefields, 800 kilometers and four years apart. In 1866, the Prussian
armies defeated Austria and its German allies at the Battle of
Koniggratz, in the modern-day Czech Republic. The battle settled the
Prussian-Austrian war and firmly excluded Vienna from its position as a
contending head for the German states. It left a union with Prussia as
the sole viable path for German security and prosperity. Bismarck had
thus crushed all internal dissenters to a united Germany under Prussia's
aegis. Notably, he did not forcefully incorporate them into Prussia's
orbit even though he could have easily done so. Instead, he fabricated a
foreign threat from a historical foe, Paris, to bring them into the
fold.

In
July 1870, Berlin coaxed Paris into an offensive action against Prussia
after some creative diplomacy by Bismarck. The memories of the
Napoleonic Wars prompted the last independent German states to rally
under the Hohenzollern banner. Two months later, the superior Prussian
army trounced the French at the Battle of Sedan and captured the French
leader, Napoleon III. In 1871, in the palace of Versailles, Prussian
King Wilhelm I was acclaimed as the kaiser of the new German Reich.

Today,
France and Germany find themselves once again at the core of the
European political system. Stratfor has often written that the fate of
the European Union rests on the stability of the Franco-German alliance,
the foundation on which more than six decades of European peace is
based. As the crisis worsened, the differences between the French and
German models have become more pronounced, and tensions have begun to
rise accordingly.

Today
it is unthinkable to imagine Merkel delivering a "blood and iron"
speech at the European Parliament. However, building nations from
several composite parts necessarily requires redistributing wealth and
power, an approach that runs counter to the sovereignty of the
constituent entities. At some point, nations must be coerced, though
military coercion is by no means the only available option.

This
is where the analogy between the European Union and 19th century
Germany ends. It is increasingly unlikely that a true fiscal and
political union in Europe can be achieved by aligning the interests of
the constituent nations. However, there does not seem to be any pressure
on Germany to force other nations into a more integrated union.

Many
Europeans hope Germany's September elections will usher in a more
assertive administration and bring about the end of the European crisis.
These people would be well served to look at Germany's history to fully
understand the cost of unification.

Images
of multiple dead bodies emerged from Syria last week. It was asserted
that poison gas killed the victims, who according to some numbered in
the hundreds. Others claimed the photos were faked while others said the
rebels were at fault. The dominant view, however, maintains that the al
Assad regime carried out the attack.

The
United States has so far avoided involvement in Syria's civil war. This
is not to say Washington has any love for the al Assad regime.
Damascus' close ties to Iran and Russia give the United States reason to
be hostile toward Syria, and Washington participated in the campaign to
force Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Still, the United States has
learned to be concerned not just with unfriendly regimes, but also with
what could follow such regimes. Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have driven
home the principle that deposing one regime means living with an
imperfect successor. In those cases, changing the regime wound up
rapidly entangling the United States in civil wars, the outcomes of
which have not been worth the price. In the case of Syria, the
insurgents are Sunni Muslims whose best-organized factions have ties to
al Qaeda.

Still,
as frequently happens, many in the United States and Europe are
appalled at the horrors of the civil war, some of whom have called on
the United States to do something. The United States has been reluctant
to heed these calls. As mentioned, Washington does not have a direct
interest in the outcome, since all possible outcomes are bad from its
perspective. Moreover, the people who are most emphatic that something
be done to stop the killings will be the first to condemn the United
States when its starts killing people to stop the killings. People would
die in any such intervention, since there are simply no clean ways to
end a civil war.

Obama's Red Lines

U.S.
President Barack Obama therefore adopted an extremely cautious
strategy. He said that the United States would not get directly involved
in Syria unless the al Assad regime used chemical weapons, stating with
a high degree of confidence that he would not have to intervene. After
all, Syrian President Bashar al Assad has now survived two years of
civil war, and he is far from defeated. The one thing that could defeat
him is foreign intervention, particularly by the United States. It was
therefore assumed he wouldn't do the one thing Obama said would trigger
U.S. action.

Al
Assad is a ruthless man: He would not hesitate to use chemical weapons
if he had to. He is also a very rational man: He would use chemical
weapons only if that were his sole option. At the moment, it is
difficult to see what desperate situation would have caused him to use
chemical weapons and risk the worst. His opponents are equally ruthless,
and we can imagine them using chemical weapons to force the United
States to intervene and depose al Assad. But their ability to access
chemical weapons is unclear, and if found out, the maneuver could cost
them all Western support. It is possible that lower-ranking officers in
al Assad's military used chemical weapons without his knowledge and
perhaps against his wishes. It is possible that the casualties were far
less than claimed. And it is possible that some of the pictures were
faked.

All
of these things are possible, but we simply don't know which is true.
More important is that major governments, including the British and
French, are claiming knowledge that al Assad carried out the attack.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a speech Aug. 26 clearly
building the case for a military response, and referring to the regime
attack as "undeniable" and the U.S. assessment so far as "grounded in
facts." Al Assad meanwhile has agreed to allow U.N. inspectors to
examine the evidence onsite. In the end, those who oppose al Assad will
claim his supporters concealed his guilt, and the insurgents will say
the same thing if they are blamed or if the inspectors determine there
is no conclusive evidence of attacks.

The
truth here has been politicized, and whoever claims to have found the
truth, whatever it actually is, will be charged with lying.
Nevertheless, the dominant emerging story is that al Assad carried out
the attack, killing hundreds of men, women and children and crossing the
red line Obama set with impunity. The U.S. president is backed into a
corner.

The
United States has chosen to take the matter to the United Nations.
Obama will make an effort to show he is acting with U.N. support. But he
knows he won't get U.N. support. The Russians, allies of al Assad and
opponents of U.N.-based military interventions, will veto any proposed
intervention. The Chinese -- who are not close to al Assad, but also
oppose the U.N.-sanctioned interventions -- will probably join them.
Regardless of whether the charges against al Assad are true, the
Russians will dispute them and veto any action. Going to the United
Nations therefore only buys time. Interestingly, the United States
declared on Sunday that it is too late for Syria to authorize
inspections. Dismissing that possibility makes the United States look
tough, and actually creates a situation where it has to be tough.

Consequences in Syria and Beyond

This is no longer simply about Syria. The United States has stated a condition that commits it to an intervention.
If it does not act when there is a clear violation of the condition,
Obama increases the chance of war with other countries like North Korea
and Iran. One of the tools the United States can use to shape the
behavior of countries like these without going to war is stating
conditions that will cause intervention, allowing the other side to
avoid crossing the line. If these countries come to believe that the
United States is actually bluffing, then the possibility of
miscalculation soars. Washington could issue a red line whose violation
it could not tolerate, like a North Korean nuclear-armed missile, but
the other side could decide this was just another Syria and cross that
line. Washington would have to attack, an attack that might not have
been necessary had it not had its Syria bluff called.

There
are also the Russian and Iranian questions. Both have invested a great
deal in supporting al Assad. They might both retaliate were someone to
attack the Syrian regime. There are already rumors in Beirut that Iran
has told Hezbollah to begin taking Americans hostage if the United
States attacks Syria. Russia meanwhile has shown in the Snowden affair
what Obama clearly regards as a hostile intent. If he strikes, he thus
must prepare for Russian counters. If he doesn't strike, he must assume
the Russians and Iranians will read this as weakness.

Syria was not an issue that affected the U.S. national interest until Obama declared a red line.
It escalated in importance at that point not because Syria is critical
to the United States, but because the credibility of its stated limits
are of vital importance. Obama's problem is that the majority of the
American people oppose military intervention, Congress is not fully
behind an intervention and those now rooting the United States on are
not bearing the bulk of the military burden -- nor will they bear the
criticism that will follow the inevitable civilian casualties, accidents
and misdeeds that are part of war regardless of the purity of the
intent.

The
question therefore becomes what the United States and the new coalition
of the willing will do if the red line has been crossed. The fantasy is
that a series of airstrikes, destroying only chemical weapons, will be
so perfectly executed that no one will be killed except those who
deserve to die. But it is hard to distinguish a man's soul from 10,000
feet. There will be deaths, and the United States will be blamed for
them.

The military dimension is hard to define because the mission is unclear. Logically, the goal should be the destruction of the chemical weapons
and their deployment systems. This is reasonable, but the problem is
determining the locations where all of the chemicals are stored. I would
assume that most are underground, which poses a huge intelligence
problem. If we assume that perfect intelligence is available and that
decision-makers trust this intelligence, hitting buried targets is quite
difficult. There is talk of a clean cruise missile strike. But it is
not clear whether these carry enough explosives to penetrate even
minimally hardened targets. Aircraft carry more substantial munitions,
and it is possible for strategic bombers to stand off and strike the
targets.

Even
so, battle damage assessments are hard. How do you know that you have
destroyed the chemicals -- that they were actually there and you
destroyed the facility containing them? Moreover, there are lots of
facilities and many will be close to civilian targets and many munitions
will go astray. The attacks could prove deadlier than the chemicals
did. And finally, attacking means al Assad loses all incentive to hold
back on using chemical weapons. If he is paying the price of using them,
he may as well use them. The gloves will come off on both sides as al
Assad seeks to use his chemical weapons before they are destroyed.

A
war on chemical weapons has a built-in insanity to it. The problem is
not chemical weapons, which probably can't be eradicated from the air.
The problem under the definition of this war would be the existence of a
regime that uses chemical weapons. It is hard to imagine how an attack
on chemical weapons can avoid an attack on the regime -- and regimes are
not destroyed from the air. Doing so requires troops. Moreover, regimes
that are destroyed must be replaced, and one cannot assume that the
regime that succeeds al Assad will be grateful to those who deposed him.
One must only recall the Shia in Iraq who celebrated Saddam's fall and
then armed to fight the Americans.

Arming
the insurgents would keep an air campaign off the table, and so appears
to be lower risk. The problem is that Obama has already said he would
arm the rebels, so announcing this as his response would still allow al
Assad to avoid the consequences of crossing the red line. Arming the
rebels also increases the chances of empowering the jihadists in Syria.

When
Obama proclaimed his red line on Syria and chemical weapons, he assumed
the issue would not come up. He made a gesture to those in his
administration who believe that the United States has a moral obligation
to put an end to brutality. He also made a gesture to those who don't
want to go to war again. It was one of those smart moves that can blow
up in a president's face when it turns out his assumption was wrong.
Whether al Assad did launch the attacks, whether the insurgents did, or
whether someone faked them doesn't matter. Unless Obama can get
overwhelming, indisputable proof that al Assad did not -- and that isn't
going to happen -- Obama will either have to act on the red line
principle or be shown to be one who bluffs. The incredible complexity of
intervening in a civil war without becoming bogged down makes the
process even more baffling.

Obama now faces the second time in his presidency when war was an option. The first was Libya. The tyrant is now dead, and what followed is not pretty.
And Libya was easy compared to Syria. Now, the president must intervene
to maintain his credibility. But there is no political support in the
United States for intervention. He must take military action, but not
one that would cause the United States to appear brutish. He must depose
al Assad, but not replace him with his opponents. He never thought al
Assad would be so reckless. Despite whether al Assad actually was, the
consensus is that he was. That's the hand the president has to play, so
it's hard to see how he avoids military action and retains credibility.
It is also hard to see how he takes military action without a political
revolt against him if it goes wrong, which it usually does.

sábado, 24 de agosto de 2013

In China, an Unprecedented Demographic Problem Takes Shape

From STRATFOR

Summary

Chinese
society is on the verge of a structural transformation even more
profound than the long and painful project of economic rebalancing,
which the Communist Party is anxiously beginning to undertake. China's
population is aging more rapidly than it is getting rich, giving rise to
a great demographic imbalance with important implications for the
Party's efforts to transform the Chinese economy and preserve its own
power in the coming decade.

Analysis

Two
reports in Chinese media highlight different aspects of China's
unfolding demographic crunch. The Ministry of Education reported Aug. 21
that more than 13,600 primary schools closed nationwide in 2012. The
ministry looked to China's dramatically shifting demographic profile to
explain the widespread closures, noting that between 2011 and 2012 alone
the number of elementary-aged students fell from nearly 200 million to
145 million. It also confirmed that between 2002 and 2012, the number of
students enrolled in primary schools dropped by nearly 20 percent. The
ministry's report comes one day after an article in People's Daily, the
government mouthpiece newspaper, warned of China's impending social
security crisis as the number of elderly is expected to rise from 194
million in 2012 to 300 million by 2025.

The
Communist Party is already considering measures to counter, or at least
limit the short-term impact of, demographic changes in Chinese society.
On one hand, the Party continues to flirt with relaxing the one-child
policy in an effort to boost fertility rates, most recently with a
potential pilot program in Shanghai that would allow only-child couples
to have another child. On the other hand, the government has proposed
raising the national retirement age from 55 to 60 for women and from 60
to 65 for men. If implemented, this would bring China's retirement
policy more in line with international norms and delay some of the
financial and other social pressures created by the ballooning number of
retirees dependent on government pensions and the care of their
children.

But
even sweeping adjustments to the one-child policy or the national
retirement age would create only temporary and partial buffers to the
problem of demographic change. It is no longer clear that the one-child
policy has any appreciable impact on population growth in China.
China's low fertility rate (1.4 children per mother, compared with an
average of 1.7 in developed countries and 2.0 in the United States) is
at least as much a reflection of urban couples' struggles to cope with
the rapidly rising cost of living and education in many Chinese cities
as it is of draconian enforcement of the policy.

Likewise,
lifting the retirement age by five years will only partly delay the
inevitable, and in the meantime it will meet stiff opposition from an
important constituency of professionals, including many civil servants.
In adjusting the retirement age, the government also risks aggravating
an employment crisis among the rapidly growing population of unemployed
college graduates in cities, many of whom are looking to filter into the
employment ladder as elderly workers exit the workforce. In this
context, the Communist Party must weigh policy adjustments carefully --
any change it makes in one area is likely to create new tensions
elsewhere in the workforce.

The
crux of China's demographic challenge lies in the fact that unlike
Japan, South Korea, the United States and Western European countries,
China will grow old before the majority of its population is anywhere
near middle-income status, let alone rich. This is historically
unprecedented, and its implications are made all the more unpredictable
by its coinciding with the Chinese economy's forced shift away from an
economic model grounded in the exploitation of inexhaustibly cheap labor
toward one in which young Chinese will be expected to sustain the
country's economic life as workers and as consumers. A temporary
reprieve from the demographic crisis will be difficult but possible with
reform, but a long-term solution is far out of reach.

sábado, 17 de agosto de 2013

In 1968, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies.
Forty-five years later, the book remains without question the greatest
guide to today's current events. Forget the libraries of books on
globalization, Political Order
reigns supreme: arguably the most incisive, albeit impolite, work
produced by a political scientist in the 20th century. If you want to understand the Arab Spring, the economic and social transition in China, or much else, ignore newspaper opinion pages and read Huntington.

The very first sentences of Political Order
have elicited anger from Washington policy elites for decades now --
precisely because they are so undeniable. "The most important political
distinction among countries," Huntington writes, "concerns not their
form of government but their degree of government." In other words,
strong democracies and strong dictatorships
have more in common than strong democracies and weak democracies. Thus,
the United States always had more in common with the Soviet Union than
with any fragile, tottering democracy in the Third World. This, in turn,
is because order usually comes before freedom
-- for without a reasonable degree of administrative order, freedom can
have little value. Huntington quotes the mid-20th century American
journalist, Walter Lippmann: "There is no greater necessity for men who
live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if
possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event,
governed."

Institutions,
therefore, are more important than democracy. Indeed, Huntington, who
died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous
world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own
"happy history." Americans assume a "unity of goodness": that all good
things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go
together. But for many places with different historical experiences
based on different geographies and circumstances that isn't always the
case. Americans, he goes on, essentially imported their political
institutions from 17th century England, and so the drama throughout
American history was usually how to limit government -- how to make it
less oppressive. But many countries in the developing world are saddled
either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they
have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the
countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American
advice is more dubious than supposed, because America's experience is
the opposite of the rest of the world.

Huntington
is rightly obsessed with the need for institutions. For the more
complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The
so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In
modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily
pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those
who are exposed as tax cheaters.

For
without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to
determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such
distinctions? Societies in the Middle East and China today reflect
societies that have reached levels of complexity where their current
institutions no longer suffice and must be replaced by different or
improved ones. The Arab Spring and the intense political infighting in
China are, in truth, institutional crises. The issue is not democracy
per se, because weak democracies can spawn ineffective institutional
orders. What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And
justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.

How
do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes
that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies
that have made war well -- Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America -- have
also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep
organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability. The
ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization.
Arab states whose regimes have fallen -- Egypt, Libya, Syria -- never
had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East --
Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups
in Syria and militias in Libya -- have often fought impressively.
Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political
formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.

Huntington
implies that today's instability -- the riotous formation of new
institutional orders -- is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As
societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with
strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization
of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth. The
main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century,
remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and
much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with
dynamic social change.

Huntington
is full of uncomfortable, counterintuitive insights. He writes that
large numbers of illiterate people in a democracy such as India's can
actually be stabilizing, since illiterates have relatively few demands;
but as literacy increase, voters become more demanding, and their
participation in democratic groupings like labor unions goes up, leading
to instability. An India of more and more literate voters may
experience more unrest.

As
for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign
of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being
created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a
replacement for revolution. "He who corrupts a system's police officers
is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the
system's police stations."

In
Huntington's minds, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be
more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the
monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove
himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as
the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power.
Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in
Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as
those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

As
for military dictatorships, Huntington adds several twists. He writes,
"In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the
middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society
looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the
existing order. Thus, paradoxically but understandably," he goes on,
"the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its
military..." And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa
underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the
Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened
branch of society at the time. Americans see the military as
conservative only because of our own particular stage of development as a
mass society.

The
logic behind much of Huntington's narrative is that the creation of
order -- not the mere holding of elections -- is progressive. Only once
order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to
make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle. Precisely
because we inhabit an era of immense social change, there will be
continual political upheaval, as human populations seek to live under
more receptive institutional orders. To better navigate the ensuing
crises, American leaders would do well to read Huntington, so as to
nuance their often stuffy lectures to foreigners about how to reform.